Charles A. Stearns 19 min read

Colonel Glinka springs from the seaplane's wing onto an ancient jetty, wetting his shorts, surveying a lonely sandspit of barren slopes and ocher cliffs that is no one's idea of paradise.

Charles A. Stearns's 1959 story is a wry colonization and first-contact tale set on a desolate coast. Sharp, atmospheric golden-age SF. Read it for a story that opens on a bedraggled officer's arrival at a forsaken outpost, and the strange business that awaits him there.

In its time

Published in 1959, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

19 min read (a short story, a single idea, delivered and gone).

Illustrated by

Dick Francis